During the corruption trial of former Alaska senator Ted Stevens, federal prosecutors were chastised by a judge for letting a witness leave town. They got in trouble for submitting erroneous evidence and were reprimanded for failing to turn over key witness statements. An FBI agent has since complained about the prosecution team’s alleged misconduct. Yesterday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had had enough. The Justice Department asked U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan to drop the case after learning that prosecutors had failed to turn over notes that contradicted testimony from their key witness. The discovery by a fresh team of lawyers and their acknowledgment that the material should have been shared with Stevens’s defense team led Holder, a former public corruption prosecutor, to conclude that the department’s biggest public corruption case in a decade could not be salvaged. Holder’s decision invites tough new scrutiny of a unit that polices corrupt officials, and it could foreshadow a shakeup in the way the government prosecutes those crimes, according to lawyers who work on such cases. Current and former department lawyers predict an overhaul that will sweep aside senior leaders in the Public Integrity […]
NEW YORK — A US hedge fund, Fairfield Greenwich, has been charged with fraud for pumping nearly $7bn (£4.8bn) of its clients’ money into Bernard Madoff’s corrupt investment empire with ‘total disregard’ for any checks on the renegade financier’s activities. The action, by the Massachusetts securities regulator, is the first to be taken against any of the so-called ‘feeder funds’ said to have channelled billions of dollars in the direction of Madoff, who was jailed last month. In Florida, federal marshals impounded Madoff’s $7m yacht at a mooring in Palm Beach. Television pictures showed officials clambering over the pristine 17-metre (55ft) vessel, searching its cabin and sticking up notices saying ‘US marshals – no trespassing’. The Fairfield Greenwich hedge fund caught up in the scandal is run by Walter Noel, a high-profile New York society figure whose glamorous family was once described by Vanity Fair magazine as ‘shoring up the virtues of a nearly extinct aristocracy’. Charges filed by Massachusetts’ secretary of state, William Galvin, said 95% of the firm’s $7.2bn Sentry fund was invested with Madoff, who admitted in court last month that he had barely done any genuine trading for nearly 20 years. Through […]
Let’s assume you’re on the receiving end of the worst April Fool’s Day joke of 2009: your computer’s been infected with the Conficker virus. It’s a frustrating, but not insurmountable, problem. This guide will walk you through how to cleanse your computer and inoculate against other Conficker variants. First off, make sure that you are actually infected. There aren’t many warning signs, but a few will stand out if you know what to look for. One fast way to check is to try to visit any major security software publisher’s Web site. If you’ve cleared your browser cache beforehand, and you can load the sites of Symantec, Eset, Avira, or AVG, you’re clean because Conficker blocks access to them. Another good litmus test is to check on the status and functionality of Windows services such as Automatic Updates, the Background Intelligent Transfer Service, Windows Defender, and Error Reporting Services. If any of those have been disabled without your consent, or if your account lockout policies have changed without approval, you might be infected. Other warning signs include unusually high traffic on your local area network, and domain controllers responding slowly to client requests. If you’re running an […]
MONDAY, March 30 — Patients receiving optimal drug therapy after suffering a heart attack do not gain any additional benefit from taking supplemental omega-3 fatty acids, a new study finds. In a study of almost 4,000 people who suffered heart attacks, researchers found no difference in rates of heart attack, stroke, sudden cardiac death or death from any cause regardless of whether they were taking the supplements or not. This finding contradicts previous studies, which suggested that taking omega-3 fatty acids improved long-term survival. ‘Although omega-3 fatty acids are considered effective for improving prognosis after acute myocardial infarction, no randomized, double-blind trial has tested their effect on top of current, strictly guideline-based treatment,’ Dr. Jochen Senges, a professor of cardiology at the Heart Center Ludwigshafen at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, said in a prepared statement. ‘In our study, we saw no beneficial effect. In patients who are already taking optimal medical therapy, cardiac event rates become very low, and omega-3 do not further improve them,’ he said. The findings of the study were to be presented Monday at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting, in Orlando, Fla. For the study, Senge’s team […]
As Congress begins to grapple with health reform, an influential senator is looking hard at one of the medical insurance industry’s most controversial practices and raising questions about how well insurers are regulated. Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the committee on commerce, is holding hearings on whether health insurers have systematically short-changed patients when they use doctors outside of their health plan’s network. As a result of understating the fees charged by out-of-network doctors, the companies are accused of underpaying consumers by hundreds of millions of dollars over the last decade. ‘This is about outright fraud, Senator Rockefeller said in an interview. The practice came to light in January after an investigation by the New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, of the databases insurers use to determine the out-of-network payments. The databases are owned by the UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s biggest insurers. Mr. Cuomo reached a settlement in which UnitedHealth agreed to stop operating the databases, run by the company’s Ingenix unit, and replace them with a new, independent source of rate information. ‘Insurance companies are part of everybody’s frustration in terms of health […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
